Wallace Street Journal
Swift Thinking
David Bond
Archives
Editor, Silver Valley
Mining Journal
March 13, 2005
Wallace, Idaho -This is a silver
mining story, because its instigators are all directly or indirectly
silver miners here in the Sleepless Silver Valley. Silver miners,
we have noticed, bore easily - no pun intended - especially as
they do not sleep. And a bored silver miner is a dangerous thing.
So while they bide their time waiting for the silver price to
firm up in the $7 range, which will make the whole nasty lot
of them (and their shareholders) quite wealthy, they are having
some huge fun at the expense of the Employment Prevention Agency
(EPA) and the vastly misinformed Greenie Movement regionally
and nationally.
Nevermind that a silver mine, even one as gargantuan as the Sunshine
Mine, leaves a footprint smaller than the size of your average
Wal-Mart, or that the Lucky Friday Mine (falsely declared just
this week by the frauds of the environmental movement to be the
worst polluter in Idaho) emits the equivalent of a pill-bottle's
worth of zinc supplements into the river every day. The EPA and
its EPA-grant-fed prolocutors in the green movement - likened
by novelist Michael Crichton in "State of Fear" to
the academically popular "science" of eugenics of the
late 19th and early 20th centuries that gave birth to the Holocaust
- have made U.S. mining their whipping boy.
Locally, they've demonized the silver miners for allegedly depositing
70-, or 80- or whatever figure-de-jour-million tons of "mining
waste" into the bed of downstream Coeur d'Alene Lake over
the past century. We did a little arithmetic a few years ago
when this first came up in the context of a kiss-of-death Superfund
listing for the lake. We toted up total mine production and discovered
that if the EPA's and greenies' claims were true, then the miners
somehow managed to throw more ore into the creek than they ever
produced from their mines - no mean feat, given the hundreds
of millions of tons of refined lead, zinc and copper and 1.2
billion ounces of silver that have been shipped out of here by
rail, truck and lunch-bucket since 1870.
Untrifled by something so un-subjective as arithmetic however,
the EPA, the Coeur d'Alene Indian Tribe and its green buddies
filed that multi-kazillion-dollar lawsuit in federal court against
the miners. Into their claim they tossed a bill for $1 billion
to dredge the 60-fathom-deep lake bottom in order to purify (there
goes that eugenics term again) the lakebed of any evidence of
upstream mining. Nevermind that the suit was largely frivolous
- it alleged (AND WE ARE NOT MAKING THIS UP!!!) that among other
things mine tailings in the lakebed were causing cavities in
the teeth of midge-flies. Given EPA's conduct thus far in the
Silver Valley, they would no doubt put their dredgings up above
the flood plain someplace nearby, where rain could wash them
back into the lake, creating a perpetual motion machine for cleanup
contractors Washington Group, Morrison-Knudsen and CH2M Hill.
The absurdities, past and contemplated, of EPA and the green
movement at least in this part of the world make, by comparison,
a Kinky Friedman governorship of Texas quite plausible. (Not
that a Friedman governorship wouldn't be a genuine delight.)
So in their Lilliputian way, Bunker Hill's Bob Hopper, New Jersey
Mining Company's Fred Brackebusch, and a dangerously pro-logic
outfit calling itself the Shoshone County Natural Resources Science
Committee, incorporated the Jonathan Swift Mining Company late
last year, then applied to the State of Idaho for a mining lease
of the bed of Coeur d'Alene Lake.
"If you believe the EPA, then there's a fortune in lead,
zinc, silver and copper to be made down there in the bottom of
Lake Coeur d'Alene. Millions and millions of tons of mineral
wealth," says Hopper, straight-faced. "And you have
to believe the EPA, because they're the government, and the government
wouldn't lie, would it?"
An equally straight-faced Rep. Dick Hardwood, a Republican from
the tiny logging town of St. Maries, Idaho, offered a bill to
the Idaho Legislature that would permit the mining of non-naturally
occurring metals. "All the things that EPA calls hazardous
wastes, our mining people call minerals," he told the House
- according to the pro-greenie Spokane Spokesman-Review newspaper.
"They're thinking there's probably $80 to $100 million worth
of material in that river."
The Jonathan Swift miners have never said a peep about dredging
the lake. They just want to lease the tailings with an eye toward
making lemonade out of lemons -- someday. But the greenies let
out a Brobdinagian shriek. Ernie Stensgar, chairman of the Coeur
d'Alene Tribe - the same tribe that wanted $700 million from
the mining industry to pay for lakebed dredging in the EPA lawsuit
- warned the Legislature that "dredging would be a terrible
mistake." EPA and its state counterpart, the Idaho Department
of Environmental Quality, ran for cover quicker'n cockroaches
from a kitchen light, claiming they'd never dredge in their wildest
dreams. But just two weeks ago, a Seattle Region X EPA spokesman
told an area newspaper that dredging in the rivers and lake was
a possibility. Harwood's bill allowing Jonathan Swift to lease
the lakebed's mineral rights not only sailed through committee
early last week, it passed the full House a day later and now
awaits consideration by the Senate.
How much longer the Jonathan Swift Mining Company boys can keep
a straight face is anyone's guess - especially in light of the
fact that none of the college-eddicated journalists and lawyers
who populate the statehouse in Boise and the greenie lobby apparently
have made the connection between the mining company and its namesake
- Jonathan Swift, arguably the greatest satirist in the history
of English literature. Whether they were thinking of Gulliver
trapped between the tenuous threads of the Lilliputians in Gulliver's
Travels, or perhaps Swift's "A Modest Proposal," his
scathing attack upon the Malthusean underpinnings of today's
environmental movement, the miners aren't saying. But as we said
in the beginning, a bored silver miner is a dangerous thing.
David Bond
email:deepee@usamedia.tv
Archives
Editor: Silver Valley
Mining Journal
David Bond covers
gold and silver mining equities for a number of national and international
publishers, including Platts Metals Week, a division of McGraw-Hill.
He lives in Wallace, Idaho, heart of the planet's richest silver
fields, the Coeur d'Alene Mining District. He is former editor
of the Wallace Miner, and holds regional and national firsts in
investigative journalism from the Atlantic City Press Club (National
Headliner) and from the Society of Professional Journalists (SDX/SPJ)
and has edited or written for newspapers on both coasts, Canada
and Alaska.
321gold Inc
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